cliff, talks on hold until after christmas andpresidentobamaandhouse speaker john boehner have not spoken since friday. lori: is there any hope for a deal? are you the last man there? >> a staff is here. the staff is in this but all eyes are on the senate when it returns this thursday to try and get a deal to avoid getting off a cliff the past friday before the president left for the holiday, he proposed a limited measure to avoid all of the cliff when speaker john boehner plan b. got scuttled. the president wants to extend the bush tax cuts and avoid some of the deep spending cuts. white house spokesperson says discussions continue between the administration and capitol hill. in july you may recall senate democrats passed an extension of the middle-class tax codes for the year. those folks making less than $250,000 per year at a cost of 157 billion. also passing the alternative minimum tax for $92 billion. mitch mcconnell is critical to hammering out a deal because he can filibuster any legislation, but his spokesman told me this morning nothing new to report. we don't know wh

the cliff will it be a couple weeks before they reachadeal? willthey be able to mate it retroactive? will they go a few more weeks? president obama feeling strong hand he can browbeat the republicans and make them crawling back is what i think he can do right now? it in terms of the revenue even if he got his way it is five cents on the dollar. david: we'll talk about that in a second. i want to squeeze you on this there are a lot of economists who say yes, if all taxes go up no doubt we'll go into recession. >> right. david: there will be less spending. producers have less money to hire people. everybody will keep all their money in their pockets. >> short term you overlook the damage done to the military about the so-called sequestration, that reduction in overall spending will have a little bit of good impact. but there is no question, we're following the path europe followed, japan followed, raising taxes in the face of wobbly economy. we haven't done anything like this on scale since early 1930's. david: even the president admitted not too long ago anything you want to do in sl

's the problem.presidentobamameetingwith the leaders at the white house. misreporting going on that the president had a new deal, looked like progress was made. no. the president had the same deal that republicans walked away from about a week ago, if you call it a deal, the deal is that he won't tax people higher above the 400,000 mark. shibani: the meeting still going on, rich edson live at the white house with the latest details. what do we know now, rich? >> what we got from an administration official, that president obama offered what he detailed in the speech a week ago keeping tax rates where they are for families earning less than $250,000 a year, extending long term unemployment insurance policy, and that bit of detail he gave a week ago in a speech is basically derived from the larger deficit proposal offered over, really, the last couple years as president of the united states. we're waiting whether or not in the meeting, lasting an hour at the white house, started at 3:10, is whether or not they made progress towards changing that proposal in a fashion to pass th